For years I’d seen The Beatles Flip Your Wig vintage board game sitting in my friend’s garage, gathering dust. It didn’t sound like much fun to play (“Each player chooses to be one of the Beatles and moves his man around the board trying to collect the four cards needed to win”) but it did have “collectible” written all over it.

When I saw an ad announcing that a vintage toy buyer would be in Orange County this week offering cash for such collectibles, I offered to broker the sale of the game. My friend had kept the game since she was a kid but had no emotional attachment to it. “Get whatever you can,” she said. Made in 1964, the game had its original pieces but the box was slightly torn and stained.

I walked into a room at the La Quinta Inn in Santa Ana yesterday with the game under my arm and presented myself to the buyer, Joel Magee of Vintage Toy Addict, who was sitting behind a long table.

“My father was a Pan Am pilot and was gone all the time,” I lied as I hesitantly pushed it across the table to him. “But he did bring me this back once. I hate to sell it, but I need the money.”

“Hmmph,” Magee said.

He inspected it for less than a minute and said: “Its value is about $125. I’ll give you $75.”

“Sold,” I said, extending my hand.

Southern California is prime pickings for vintage toys, Magee told me later, which is why it is profitable to come here for a week from his home in Singer Island, Fla. (Today through Monday he will be at the Courtyard by Marriott at 2045 S. Harbor Blvd. in Anaheim.)

“It’s because Mattel and Disney are out here. Mattel gave a lot of toys to its employees to take home and test. A lot of Mattel employees still have them. Sometimes they didn’t know what to do with them and they are still in mint condition.”

And then within 10 minutes of each other, I kid you not, a man who was a former Disney employee, and a woman married to a former Mattel employee, walked in.

Marlene Wedner of Huntington Beach brought in several unopened boxes containing toy trucks and cars, including a Hot Wheels Super Charger Sprint Set. Her husband had worked at Mattel in the 1960s.

“It’s never been opened because I had girls,” she told me. “They (the toys) were up in the garage. I didn’t even remember I had them until I moved.”

It’s a cutthroat business, old toys, Magee told me. In fact, when he heard me ask for one seller’s phone number he thought I was a “sniper” – a competing toy buyer who poaches Magee’s would-be sellers before they can get to the front of the line.

The wow moment was when the former Disney employee walked up with a CD and asked Magee to put it in his computer. I walked around the table behind Magee so I could see. Magee opened the file and about 95 photographs appeared. Not Disney stuff; Disneyland stuff.

Like: signage that had been in the park but scrapped during remodels – signs for the Disneyland Railroad, Tom Sawyer’s Island, Club 33, the Jungle Cruise, Splash Mountain, and more. Like: poster-size black-and-white photographs of the original Mouseketeers which had been displayed at the Mickey Mouse Club Theater, which closed more than 30 years ago. Like: dozens of employee name badges. Like: a beautiful, hand-painted 5-foot-by-8-foot canvas banner for the Riverboat Excursion. The latter piece was being torn up by the wind and rain when the employee salvaged it.

“It took me four days to peel it off the wall,” he told me. “Nobody cared. Nobody wanted it.”

The guy didn’t want to give me his name “for legal reasons,” but I saw and heard enough to convince me he had worked at Disneyland. He said all the materials had been thrown away or slated for destruction.

“I’m not going to break up the collection,” the man told Magee.

Magee, who said he’s building a room in his home dedicated to Disney memorabilia, was too overwhelmed by the sheer amount of one-of-a-kind stuff and told the mystery man he would get back to him. Magee took a phone number that began with a 714 area code. “This is obviously going to require a lot of digesting,” he said.

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